Mark Dorrell asked me this question when I was young, so I guess that people in the scene are curious. Well, I come from a musical family, and people that attended musicals or watched them on TV. Like, it wasn't the thing that my relatives were into, but it was around. Then I began taking jazz theory lessons from Michael Bell when he was in the middle of doing post-production for Men Shouldn't Sing, and went to the premiere of that. Michael is a formidable jazz bassist and wrote a double bass concerto, so most of the stuff he taught was highly sophisticated modal and harmonic theory, but he would always give the show tunes the big sell. He taught me that the verses are sometimes more interesting than the refrains! Plus I'm a millenial, and I came of age when all the animated cartoons had songs. -
Burnside was very strange: if you were in the orchestra or choir, then you weren't able to be in the school show as well. Occasionally some people bent the unspoken rule, but not much and it wasn't encouraged. So I came at show tunes from a practical perspective: doing them in jazz band or choir. -
Show music eventually became my hobby that kept me sane during all the tedious theory that I took at university. Though I took an acting paper, it never really occurred to me to actually be in a show: I much preferred writing music to singing it. One thing that people in Wellington wouldn't have known until recently is that I'm a good scat singer. That's something I developed as a teenager in Christchurch that used to sing along to the Real Group and had friends that were into harmony singing. In terms of my musicals, I see them as part of my film career, and it was movie musicals that inspired me to actually want to do it myself. Stage musicals in NZ are good now, but when I grew up the standard was much lower. I occasionally have theatrical ideas, and the Perfumed Garden is one of those, but I tend to write songs for the screen to satisfy myself, or at someone's request for various media and occasions.
Essentially, I know a lot because I know the music theory behind the scores, and most of this modern generation of treacly piano pop Broadway songs that emerge from BMI or NYU don't use chord substitutions.